Alamo Breast Cancer Foundation offers many services for women

Updated 12:30 am, Monday, December 17, 2012

Photo: Helen L. Montoya, San Antonio Express-News

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Alamo Breast Cancer Foundation founder Dale Eastman speaks with Joanna Sawicka during at a health fair at US Global Investors. The foundation aims to draw attention and educate women on breast cancer. The organization funds mammograms and follow-up diagnostic tests for patients and is a local, state and national breast cancer advocate.

Alamo Breast Cancer Foundation founder Dale Eastman speaks with Joanna Sawicka during at a health fair at US Global Investors. The foundation aims to draw attention and educate women on breast cancer. The

Breast cancer educational material provided by Alamo Breast Cancer Foundation sits on a table at a health fair at US Global Investors. The organization funds mammograms and follow-up diagnostic tests for patients and is a local, state and national breast cancer advocate.

Breast cancer educational material provided by Alamo Breast Cancer Foundation sits on a table at a health fair at US Global Investors. The organization funds mammograms and follow-up diagnostic tests for

When Dale Eastman was diagnosed with breast cancer about 20 years ago, she couldn't just Google the disease to learn more about the disease.

“There wasn't much breast cancer awareness out there,” she said, “and there was no way to get information. I was clamoring for information and just wanted to talk to someone.”

Her friends asked their friends, and she found three survivors who held her hands through the grueling months of treatment. If she made it through, she told her friends, she would start an organization to help women in her position.

In 1993, the quartet founded the Alamo Breast Cancer Foundation, one of several area nonprofits featured in the San Antonio Express-News' 18th annual Grace of Giving series.

During its first year, ABCF started a bilingual help line, which 25 active volunteers still staff. Women looking for information or advice leave a message for a volunteer at 692-9535 and the call is returned between 9 a.m. and 9 p.m., Eastman said.

Lobbying long has been a tenet, Eastman said, but the organization's 250 members — all breast cancer survivors — also are involved in outreach and education. Many are patient advocates.

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“There are some people who, rather than just going on with our lives, we try to make other lives better,” Eastman said.

ABCF's president, Sandi Stanford, said some of the organization's most important work takes place at outreach programs, which are held twice a year in underprivileged, underserved neighborhoods. At the last event, held in October, 23 women were screened for breast cancer. Five required diagnostics, Stanford said, and another two were told a follow-up visit was needed in six months.

The organization also pays for advocates to attend the annual San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, the largest event about breast cancer worldwide, and holds evening sessions to summarize the day's big news.

The women annually visit legislators in Austin and Washington, D.C., where Stanford once showed a bubbly burn scar on her right arm that was the result of chemotherapy. Now, most chemotherapy is taken by pill, a cheaper and logistically easier process.

“We do this because we don't want our children to go through what we've gone through,” Stanford said.